Archive for the ‘News/opinion’ Category

Normalizing deviance on abortion and MAGA

Posted: September 5, 2020 by ng36b in abortion, Always look at the bright side of Trump, News/opinion, Uncomfortable Truths
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Trailer for the movie “Unplanned”, from unplannedfilm.com

The first time I heard the term “normalized deviance” was at a Project Management group meeting when one of the members (an aviator) described how dangerous it was to fly with multiple equipment waivers. As he described it, once you got used to a piece of equipment not working, it eventually just became accepted, and that lowered the drive to get it fixed. He called that “normalized deviance, and he compared it to smoking marijuana. Twenty years ago, most people considered smoking marijuana illegal. Now? We’re likely to see it legalized in less than ten years throughout the country.

Normalizing deviance comes from constantly doing something that is supposed to be wrong or illegal, and by constant exposure, cause people to accept that behavior. Marijuana use is a great example. If you attended college in the last 20 years, you probably knew someone that smoked marijuana, and they probably were an OK person. Soon it was easy to question why marijuana was illegal. Dangerous substance? So is tobacco and alcohol, but we allow those. “Gateway drug?” Probably not, according to plenty of other studies. Combine that with health and even medical benefits, and soon it is OK to openly support marijuana use.

Normalizing deviance, although it sounds bad, isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s what broke down barriers to inter-racial marriage, or rampant anti-Catholic bias among new immigrants to America. Unfortunately, in the areas of abortion and open support to President Trump, its a troubling trend. In the case of abortion, its accepted that you can’t support women’s rights without also supporting abortion. This flies in the faces of the millions of women that are pro-life, yet its simply accepted in a large part of society.

The other normalized deviance is physical altercations on any Trump supporter. It’s accepted by too many people that if you put up a Trump sign in your yard, or wear a MAGA hat in public, you’re likely to get vandalized or attacked. That shouldn’t be the case. As a young boy during the 1996 Presidential election, I remember getting signs from all three Presidential candidates, mainly because I thought it was interesting. Rampant sign destruction didn’t happen, and when signs were damaged, people didn’t justify it. That’s not the case anymore.

If conservatives continue to allow this normalized deviance, it’ll be near impossible to openly speak about abortion or support conservative candidates. While plenty of people will simply stay quiet and vote conservatively anyway, it’ll be nearly impossible to raise enthusiastic support, especially among young people who are more inclined to be open about their beliefs and opinions.

It’s not enough to simply push back. Making movies like “Unplanned” and scoring legal victories like Nick Sandmann did are good starts, but that can’t be the end state. It not enough to be grudgingly tolerated in the background. The baseline has to be that you can be a woman and be pro-life, and that you can put a sign in your yard and reasonably expect it to stay up. Until that happens, we haven’t normalized enough conservative deviance.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Last week’s riot toll is three dead

Posted: August 30, 2020 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, elections, media, News/opinion
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By John Ruberry

The mainstream media has been downplaying the rioting and looting that has been occurring this summer across many large American cities–all run by Democrats.

Three people were shot last week in what the mainstream media often calls “unrest,” but are in fact riots.

Powerline has rightly called the downplaying by the media of last week’s looting in Minneapolis “journalistic malpractice.” 

One state over in Wisconsin, during the rioting and looting in Kenosha last week, a 17-year-old from nearby Antioch, Illinois, Kyle Rittenhouse, was charged with murdering three people. The media is focusing on how the riots started–anger over police shooting Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old with a criminal record, seven times. Fair enough.

The media is also exploring Rittenshouse’s possible connection with a local militia. 

Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, responded to the mayhem by sending a small force of National Guard trips, 125 of them, on Monday, which was doubled the next day. After Tuesday’s shootings Evers doubled the deployment again and he’s since accepted Guard assistance from other states and from the federal government. 

But what if Evers dispatched 500 National Guard troops to Kenosha as soon as the rioting started Sunday night? Perhaps that militia would have stayed home and Rittenhouse, who appears to be a troubled cop-wannabe that got his hands on an AR-15 rifle despite being a minor, would have remained home in Illinois. 

Details are still coming in on the shooting death of a man during Saturday’s round of rioting in Portland, Oregon. Last night a pro-Trump group confronted Black Lives Matter in downtown Portland. In what the local police are calling a homicide–a man wearing clothing with a Patriot Prayer logo was shot to death in the middle of a street. The Oregonian is calling Patriot Prayer a far-right group. Of course the mainstream media never calls Antifa far-left, but that’s a subject for another post, of course. 

The rioting, mercifully no longer called “mostly peaceful” by the media, has been a nightly event for three months in Oregon’s largest city. Portland’s ineffective mayor, Ted Wheeler, is deaf to the concern of law-abiding citizens of the Rose City. 

It’s a new week. Hopefully last week’s riot deaths will be the last ones. And perhaps these homicides will finally compel mayors like Wheeler to take back their cities in the names of the rank-and-file citizens they claim to represent. 

Never forget: The most important responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens. 

As for the mainstream media, I believe they are too far gone to save themselves. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Tariffs on Cruise Lines?

Posted: August 29, 2020 by ng36b in business, economy, News/opinion, trade
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The Pride of America, the only US flagged cruise ship, in Hawaii. Image from Wikipedia.

Cruise ships haven’t had good news in 2020. Many of the first COVID patients in the US, including the people in my area, caught the disease while onboard a cruise vessel. Then cruise lines wanted federal money under the CARES act, even though they aren’t incorporated in the United States, and thus don’t pay US taxes. Combined with the difficulty in cleaning a ship while underway, and cruise lines are facing a difficult return to normal. If stock price is any indication, Carnival Cruise line plummeted from 50 dollars a share in January to almost 8 dollars in April, and is currently sitting around 17 dollars.

Cruise lines have found unique ways to evade US laws and taxes. All but one cruise ship is flagged outside the United States. The flag of the cruise ship allows it to sail in international waters, and dictates what sort of domestic laws apply while onboard. Most cruise ships are flagged in Liberia, Bahamas or Panama. Each of these nations have weak labor laws with limited ability to enforce them. Cruise lines don’t have a minimum wage and get away with significantly lower safety standards. Worse still, if a crime is committed onboard, its notoriously hard to prosecute. A study from the University of Florida found that:

The Cruise Line International Association claims that cruise ships are inherently secure because ships offer a controlled environment with limited access. “However, there has been some startling statistics between 2003 and 2005: 24 people were reported missing and 178 people reported a claim against sexual assault. Additionally, the FBI has opened investigations on 305 cruise-based crimes, from 2000-2005” (Porter, 2006, p.597). The CLIA compares these statistics to U.S. crime rates and harps on being the safest form of transportation and inherently secure. They fail however, to examine the context to which these statistics apply.

Given that Americans make up nearly 75% of cruise line passengers, it seems unfair to have Americans financing a system that is exploiting workers and dodging taxes. The tax dodging makes it easy to undercut any US company trying to start a competitive cruise line. Given the negative attention on cruise lines, its probably time for President Trump to threaten tariffs on the cruise industry.

Cruise ships pay a docking fee and port tariff, based on tonnage, when they dock in a US port. An easy way to encourage better behavior is to raise the port tariffs on non-US flagged vessels, as well as providing a discounted tariff to cruise lines that voluntarily follow US employment and criminal laws. You could have a high tariff, with a discount if the ship pays minimum wages, and a further discount if they follow proper US criminal proceedings. The result is a carrot and stick approach, either getting more money from the industry or enforcing better behavior on the part of the cruise line. Given that cruise lines are struggling, now is the time to negotiate a better deal.

Cruise lines have benefited from America for years under flags of convenience. Perhaps its time they follow the same rules the rest of the United States does.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Lori Lightfoot believes she deserves security on her block, but not Chicago’s peasants

Posted: August 23, 2020 by John Ruberry in business, crime, culture, economy, News/opinion, politics
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North Michigan Avenue in June after Chicago’s first round of looting this summer

By John Ruberry

If you need more proof that America’s elite class feels that there are rules for them but not you, then take a look at Chicago’s floundering mayor, Lori Lightfoot.

America’s third-largest–for now–city isn’t at the abyss, it’s in it. Riots, looting shootings, unsustainable pension debt, and a declining population are what defines her Chicago. To be fair, the public worker pension bomb is largely the creation of Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago for all of the 1990s and 2000s.

Streets are regularly blocked off–not by police–but by protesters who don’t even bother apply for a rally permit. One march eight days ago, which was hampered by a poor turnout, had as its goal to close off off Interstate 90-94, known as the Dan Ryan Expressway, on the South Side. The right to peaceful assemble does not include blocking off an expressway, which, according to a police friend of mine, breaks a state law: unauthorized entry on to an interstate highway. I find it hard to believe that Chicago cops can’t find a law to allow them to arrest people who block traffic elsewhere in the city. 

That march was a Trojan horse for agitators. The protest migrated to downtown, where it ended violently–even Lightfoot has ascertained that fact, telling Face the Nation, “What we’ve seen is people who have embedded themselves in these seemingly peaceful protests [emphasis mine],” she admitted, “and have come for a fight.” Downtown Chicago and the Near North Side earlier that week was struck by widespread looting, and that round of mayhem delivered a blow that the city may never recover from because 70 percent of Chicago’s economic activity comes from the downtown area.

As I wrote in this space last Sunday, Welcome to Detroit, Chicago.

One popular rally site has been the block in Logan Square on the Northwest Side where Lightfoot lives. But backed by a heavy police presence, protests are now banned there.

“I think that residents of this city, understanding the nature of the threats that we are receiving on a daily basis, on a daily basis, understand I have a right to make sure that my home is secure,” Lightfoot said last week.

Public figures receive threats regularly. If you don’t like that then don’t run for political office. But Mayor Lightweight is clueless on this fact. She’s clueless on many other things, but that’s another matter.

“That’s not what my wife and my child signed up for,” she declared while defending her action. “It’s not what my neighbors signed up for. We have a right in our home to live in peace.”

Meanwhile, murders in Chicago are up 50 percent this year over 2019 and they were 139 percent higher in July alone. Many business owners and their employees are coping with two rounds of looting in a little over two months. They are dreading increases in their insurance coverage–some are considering closing their boarded-up doors for good. 

So much for the peasants’ right to “live in peace.”

Chicago police officers are working twelve-hour shifts to address the protests that often turn violent and the dramatic spike in shootings. There aren’t cops in Chicago sitting around looking for things to do. Duh! But Mayor Beetlejuice has her praetorian guard in front of here home, who last night arrested six protesters. All of them by the way, are from out of state, which belies the meme of the left that the protests are spontaneous outbursts by locals. 

What else is going on in Lightfoot’s home base in Logan Square? Earlier this month a 14-year-old was told, “You’re a racist and you ain’t gonna do sh*t,” by a man as he allegedly stole the kid’s bike. It’s too bad there wasn’t an army of cops there when that happened, although the suspect was arrested a half-hour later after he allegedly committed two more crimes

And of course there is no army of police officers on each block of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods on the West and South Sides. As for violent crimes in the city it’s not just about guns. Last week a serial stabber of sleeping homeless men was arrested. Will Lightfoot blame knives-from-Indiana for those attacks, one of which was fatal?

On Saturday Black Lives Matter is planning a march on North Michigan Avenue just north of downtown. The area is, for now, known as the Magnificent Mile. It is, for now, packed with many retail stores. Don’t forget, a Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer said of looting, “That is reparations.”  My guess is that the protest will be allowed tp proceed. Many people live on the Mag Mile too. My suggestion to them is to pool their funds and buy a condo for Lightfoot and pay her moving expenses. 

And then there will be no more protests on North Michigan Avenue.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit. 

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